Stop and Look – Old Walton Bridge over the Thames by Giovanni Antonio Canaletto (1754)

After looking at John Sell Cotman’s magisterial watercolour Greta Bridge the other week I couldn’t resist choosing another painting of an English bridge, partly because it’s very beautiful and partly because it could hardly be more different. 

For a start, Canaletto wasn’t English: he was, as everyone knows, an Italian whose speciality was painting views of Venice. True, he painted them with English tourists in mind, and many of his finest views of Venice are still in England, having been bought from him during the heyday of the Grand Tour. (That this reflects a definite national character in art appreciation is highlighted by the fact that there are, I believe, no Canalettos in Austria).

He began painting in an almost Romantic way, using sweeping brushstrokes to suggest sombre shadow and brilliant sunlight alternating across the textures of the old walls of Venice. But as he responded to the tourists’ demands for standard views his method of painting simplified itself into a system of effective formulas with bright clear colour and a characteristic use of pure white pigment to suggest the sparkle of light on water.

This pictorial language  – you might call it an exceptionally sophisticated form of picture post-card – was eminently suited to topographical subjects and enabled Canaletto to transfer seamlessly to the depiction of another city on water – London. He was a protégé of the British Consul in Venice, Joseph Smith, who acted as his agent, and through whose offices many notables in England, including the King himself, became owners of important collections of Canaletto’s work.

He came to England in 1746 and remained here for most of the ensuing decade, during which time he executed splendid views of London for the Dukes of Richmond and Northumberland, and of Warwick Castle for Lord Brooke. This picture was painted for one of the last of his English patrons, Thomas Hollis, whose house can be seen among the trees on the far (south) bank of the river, and who is present himself in the foreground with a friend and his Italian manservant, with his dog Malta.

Canaletto had already painted landscapes with cloudy skies and leafy trees while he was still in Italy, and here he adapts that experience effortlessly to the requirements of English country scenery. And the sparkling white highlights that so effectively conjured the sunlit ripples of water on the Grand Canal here find a new application in the white-painted wooden struts of the bridge.

Practical and humdrum as it is, Canaletto contrives to give the bridge a delicacy that is almost Chinese, and we can’t but wonder whether he was consciously thinking of the fashion for Chinoiserie that was sweeping England at this date. Just downstream from Walton on Thames, at Kew Gardens, Sir William Chambers was to complete his famous Pagoda less than a decade later, in 1762.

But Chinoiserie had little to do with the bridge at Walton. It was designed by William Etheridge, with a central span of 39 metres – the longest single span in Britain at the time.  Etheridge was also responsible for the timber bridge over the Cam at Queens’ College, Cambridge, which was popularly supposed to have been cunningly constructed to stay up without any pegs or nails. Unhappily the structure that Canaletto renders so exquisite in his painting (and he made another version of the view which is now at Yale) only survived until 1783, when it was replaced by a stone bridge, which was to become the subject of several works by J M W Turner.